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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Well
Content
Requires
Perhaps
Playing
Practice
Less
Easy
Violin
Wells
Contentment

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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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